Visualizing Win Shares
January 22nd, 2007 by Tim Daloisio
Inspired by Ryan Armbrust at The Pastime, here is my attempt to visually represent win share by player for the 2006 Red Sox season.
For those of you new to Win Shares, a Win Share is statistic built by Bill James that uses a variety of factors to boil players performance and his impact on his team’s actual wins. How much did any player actually contribute to the 86 wins the Red Sox recorded last year?
Each win share represents one third of an actual win. For a good description of Win Shares, check here or here. You can find sortable Win Share totals for the Red Sox at the Hardball Times stats page.
Below you will find a visual representation of the Red Sox Win Shares for the 2006 season. The larger the box, the more impact that player had on the amount of Red Sox wins last year, the same can be said for the color gradients, the darker the better. Both David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were responsible for a little over 11% of the 2006 Red Sox wins each.
Both Kevin Youkilis and Jonathan Papelbon were instrumental in creating wins, more than any starting pitcher.
Not included in this graph was one win share created by Brian Corey (my ability to add one more cell in excel and keep it square milited me in that regard). Also not referenced were the following players who created no net wins for the Red Sox last year: Abe Alvarez, Adam Stern, Craig Hansen, Corky Miller, Carlos Pena, Dustin Mohr, David Murphy, David Pauley, Dustin Pedroia, Josh Bard, Ken Huckaby, Mike Holtz, Willie Harris, Jason Johnson, Kevin Jarvis, and Mike Burns.
Three players on last year’s roster cost the Red Sox more wins than they created. Javier Lopez (C), Jermaine Van Burren, and Lenny Dinardo combine for -3 Win Shares, or one loss in the standings.
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Nicely done. That’s a bit easier on the eyes than my attempt, since you don’t have any unused space. Mind if I ask how you set that up in excel?
Best way I could do it was pretty manual and probably more simple than you are thinking it is ;)
I took, the square root of the total win shares for the team. In this case the root of 258 was a little over 16.
I made a square, 16×16 with square cells. Then started filling in one win share per square.
I wish there was a more automated way to do it in flash like you suggested.
I was also thinking about doing it as a tag cloud. I’ll think more about that.
Thanks for the idea!
That’s pretty much the greatest visual representation of a statistic I’ve ever seen. Very nice work!
That makes sense. Man, I wish I’d thought of that… I went with a far too complex system involving Paint and, well… it was complex. That’s what I get for doing most of my work after midnight. I get good ideas, and poor implementations of them.
I’m trying to enlist some of my very valuable computer engineering friends to assist me in making things like this prettier, faster, and more automated. So far, they’re too busy with other endeavors.